I’d like to make a rather more basic point. It is impossible for a planet to be hidden behind the sun for years on end in a 3600 year orbit approaching from the outer solar system as the Nibiru people claim. This is the most basic elementary astronomy but of course many of us never study astronomy. It’s because the Earth orbits the sun. Most of us agree that the Earth orbits the sun, nowadays, but few stop to think what it means.
It is true that stars and planets can hide behind the sun. Take Sirius for example.
Sirius is the bright star just to left and below the middle of this photo. night sky looking towards Orion
You can see Sirius from the Northern hemisphere as a bright star in winter and early spring. It’s hidden behind the sun in summer and autumn. See Sirius is Dog Star and brightest star | EarthSky.org
Here is a graphic by
However, they can only be hidden for half the year. If a star is hidden from us in spring, you just need to wait until autumn and there it will be plain to view. Sirius is hidden in summer, but easy to see in winter.
That’s true of the planets too, for the ones that orbit further away than Earth. Venus and Mercury are different, they are so close to the sun that they just go back and forth to either side of it as seen from Earth - sometimes in the late evening sky and sometimes in the early morning sky.
But Mars, Jupiter, Saturn as the main ones visible to the naked eye, and the fainter planets further away Uranus, Neptune, Pluto which you look at with telescopes - they are visible in the night sky for half the year. At some point, every year, when we are roughly between it and the sun, each planet will rise when the sun sets, set when the sun rises, and is in the sky all night.
Also, if anything comes into the inner solar system from beyond Pluto - which is possible with a long period comet - it has to take ten years to get here. Any faster, and it would be going so fast it would escape from the solar system and can’t be in orbit around the sun.
So, when they say Nibiru is hidden behind the sun, it has to have been hidden for ten years at least on its long journey in - if it existed which is impossible of course.
Try asking this question if anyone tells you that Nibiru hides behind the sun. If it is hidden behind the sun in summer, where was it in winter, when Earth was the other side of the sun from where it is now?
I guarantee that they won’t be able to answer this. They will just change subject.
They may say “Ah but it is dark, because it’s a brown dwarf”. Well, a brown dwarf is a “failed star”, a planet that is larger than Jupiter, nearly large enough to shine by its own light but not quite big enough. It shines by infrared light but doesn’t produce any visible light of its own.
Well, the Moon also doesn’t shine by its own light. Yet it is easy to see. The Moon is dark also, as dark as worn asphalt, as you can tell if you look at the moon rocks.
When we see the bright moon in the sky - this is what we are looking at, dark rocks as dark as worn asphalt. It looks so bright because the sunlight hitting it is bright, and because we see it against a dark night sky. This is a rare lunar meteorite, a meteorite found on Earth that comes from the Moon. Lunaite (lunar breccia)
It only looks so bright because the sunlight shining on it is so very bright and because the night sky is dark.
Brown dwarfs vary a lot in how dark they are, but the very darkest brown dwarf at the distance of Jupiter would be as bright as Betelgeuse.
Betelgeuse is the bright slighlty reddish star to the middle right of this picture. The darkest brown dwarf at the distance of Jupiter would be as bright as Betelgeuse. night sky looking towards Orion
The other thing they are likely to do to change subject is to say that Nibiru is approaching us from the South pole and is only visible from Antarctica. Here is a rather hilarious (for astronomers) obviously fake video that is supposed to show Nibiru hovering above the South pole.
Please don’t be taken in by such videos. This is easy to fake. You can do it on an ordinary PC and you don’t need any special equipment. Probably can do it even with free tools nowadays. It is just a video off some base in an icy place, then fades to a wobbly photo of a planet like object, with sound effects added. Then the “planet” disappears off the screen to the top and the icy location reappears. It doesn’t even have both on screen at once, so basic elementary faking there.
The so called “Planet” here, I’m pretty sure is Saturn’s moon Mimas, from the distinctive shape of that enormous crater.
This is a better view of it:
Now if you pay any attention to the stars and know how to find the pole star, you may know that in the northern hemisphere whenever you get a clear night, you always see the pole star. What’s more it is always at the exactly same place in the sky. It doesn’t move at all, or only by minute amounts, all night and all year. Every day of the year, if it’s a clear night, look due North and up a fair bit, and there it is.
If you are close to the equator, then it’s very low just above the horizon, but again, always in the same place, night after night. Here it is from Thailand.
This is a photo of the big dipper and Polaris from Thailand - Polaris is that slightly fainter star at middle left. It is visible all night, every night, everywhere in the Northern hemisphere, except right at the equator. In Thailand it's close to the horizon, not high in the sky as it is here in the UK, but still is visible all night.
Well, it’s the same in the Southern hemisphere. Just as the pole star is visible from most of the entire northern hemisphere, the southern cross is visible from all of the southern hemisphere, except again from very close to the equator.
Anything visible in the night sky above the South Pole would also be visible in Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa, South America, etc. That is, unless it is actually hovering above the South pole almost in the Earth's atmosphere.
So if they say to you that it is hidden from view because it’s approaching from the South, ask them, why then don’t we get all our iuternet friends from the southern hemisphere (if you don’t live there yourself) shouting out to us that they can see a big planet hovering near the southern cross in their sky?
This all shows that this is an idea that spreads only because many people have no idea about physics. The people who say these things, as Niel De Grasse Tyson says, must have flunked physics at school.
That’s why astronomers just don’t give any time at all to these Nibiru people.
They don’t really understand what it means for the Earth to orbit the sun, and they don’t understand how the stars work, and don’t know that the Southern cross is visible all night all year round throughout the southern hemisphere.
So - can you not see, these are not clear sighted people with a special understanding of the future, able to predict what is going to happen to us. They are just muddled, confused, deluded, people, and sometimes deliberately hoaxing us.
Sometimes you can be sure that it is just a hoax. This is a clip from a frame from a video recently posted to youtube that got many people scared.
Here is a photograph of the full Moon for comparison
And here is the full video:
However much one might want to think that nobody could do such a thing, it is just not credible, that anyone would take a fuzzy video of the full Moon through a red filter, or post production edit it to look red, and not realize that they are videoing the Moon.
Please don’t be scared by this nutty idea or by the many people who jump on the bandwaggon and share videos like this.
Here I am talking about this in an audio recording: Why Nibiru can’t_hide_behind_the Sun
SO CAN NIBIRU BE IN A STABLE ORBIT?
So anyway with this background, to return to the question. I know the question is about Earth, but it’s not Earth that’s in trouble here, it’s Nibiru, it couldn’t be there.
Think about it. They say that this planet does repeated flybys of Earth every 3600 years. Well every time it did that, its orbit would change. And if it flys past Earth, then of course on many orbits it would also fly by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune which are much larger.
There may well have been planets in orbits like that in the early solar system. But they didn’t last long because within a few orbits they either hit Jupiter, hit the Sun, were ejected from the solar system, or were torn into pieces by tidal effects of a close flyby of Jupiter (most likely) or melted in the heat of the Sun. It is not possible that there are any planets in orbits like this in our current solar system.
HOW CAN WE BE SO SURE, WHEN WE DISCOVER NEW PLANETS ALL THE TIME
Now some people find this hard to understand because they hear that astronomers find new planets all the time. Well it depends how far away it is.
If you have a tennis ball in your hand you can see it easily. If you look at a tennis game from a distance it might be quite hard to see. And if you look at it from, say, ten miles away you can’t see it at all.
It’s like that. The Pan STARRS telescope which searches for asteroids every night can see objects of up to 300 meters in diameter right out to the outer edge of the asteroid belt. It has already found all the asteroids of 10 kilometers in diameter or larger in ‘Earth crossing orbits inside of Jupiter and 90% of the ones of 1 kilometer in diameter. So we could still be missing objects of 1 km in diameter out to Jupiter, but not something of 10 km in diameter.
When you get to Neptune then we are still discovering objects of the order of 100 km in diameter. And when you get to many times the distance to Neptune or Pluto, then we might be able to find planets as big as Earth or even Jupiter, they think, if it is very far away. And around distant stars, light years away, we think that just about every star has planets, and they are very hard to spot from Earth because they are so far away.
In the other direction, towards the sun, then we could miss asteroids inside of Mercury. Immediately inside Mercury, the orbit would be unstable, could only be there for a short time. And very close to the sun, the rocks would boil and then evaporate in the heat of the sun. But in between, there is a zone where there could be asteroids hidden from view. But we’d see them cross in front of the Sun and in other ways. There have been searches to try to find them and nothing has been found yet. If they exist, they could be up to a few tens of kilometers in diameter. But they are of no risk at all to Earth because they are so close to the Sun, tightly bound in an orbit that goes around the Sun many times a year.
EXAMPLE OF A COW IN YOUR HOUSE
For an everyday example, suppose that a friend tells you that you have a cow in your house. Every time they pass your house they hear it mooing and they’ve even seen it. Well would you believe them?
That’s the sort of thing you’d know about. There’s no way you could miss a cow in your house. If they keep saying this, like the Nibiru people who keep saying there’s a hidden planet in the inner solar system, well you just would give up eventually, just politely leave them to their beliefs.
That is, unless you actually do have a cow in your house :).
Then you would believe them. But it’s not the sort of thing that could happen, and you don’t know about it. But if they say that they have lost their keys in your house, then yes, you’d hunt around the house, do your best to find them. So it’s like that.
THINGS THAT COULD THREATEN US
Now there are things that can threaten us. Not planet sized. Not even 100 km in size. Nothing large enough to make humans extinct with even the most basic of technology. But there are things that could be seriously bad news for us even so.
Well - don’t worry about them first, they are very very rare. You can be 99.999999% certain you won’t be hit by a giant asteroid this century. You are more likely to be killed by a tornado or a lightning strike, and far more likely to be killed in a car crash. These everyday things are the main things you need to take care about.
However the asteroids are important because they are the one natural disaster we can actually predict to the minute. Astronomers when talking about real asteroids that fly past Earth don’t say “oh it could fly past in spring” then when spring comes they say “oh it will fly past in autumn” or “ it will fly past just before Christmas” or whatever.
They will say - it will fly past on such and such a date, at this exact time to the minute. If you know enough about the orbit to know it is going to fly past Earth, you definitely know exactly when it will do it too. Because the Earth moves by 108,000 km/h so if you got the time of the flyby wrong by even a few hours, then it would be further away than the Moon.
So - you have a prediction exact to the minute. If we can predict it a decade in advance as well, just a gentle nudge will move it. It’s enough to change its velocity by a little more than the speed of a fast moving snail to get it to miss the Earth a decade later by an Earth radius. And if it does a flyby of Earth first, then it will have a tiny “keyhole” of a few hundred meters it has to go through to hit Earth next time around. Now you just need to change its velocity by a few cms a day!
So the main priority here is to track these things and predict them. If we can predict them long in advance we can prevent them. And - we are much more at risk from volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis etc. Nobody in recent history has been killed by an asteroid though some have in ancient history. Even then we haven’t had anything like an asteroid equivalent of Pompeii.
So, not something to be alarmed about. But I think that given how predictable asteroids are, that we could evacuate the impact zone, just warn people to stay away from windows, or given enough warning, then deflect them, that we should do more to deal with this easily detected and preventable hazard.
The UK government has just voted to approve renewal of Trident nuclear weapon system at a cost, some say, of $205 billion ($268 billion).
HMS Victorious at Clyde naval base. Photograph: Reuters. Replacing Trident will cost at least £205bn, campaigners say
When we spend so much on defending against each other - whatever you think about whether we should have done it or not (disclosure, I’ think we should be working towards world wide nuclear disarmament myself, and that the UK could take a lead there) - whatever you think of that, could we not spend a tiny fraction of the amount we spend on nuclear weapons on defending Earth against asteroids?
For half a billion dollars, less than 0.2% of the cost of Trident renewal, the UK government, unilaterally, could launch a spacecraft to Venus orbit which would find the majority of hazardous objects right down to 20 meters in diameter in 6.5 years. Astronomers know exactly what to do to find these objects, they just need the funding to go ahead.
The Sentinel space telescope. Estimated cost half a billion dollars (381 million pounds)
It would sit inside of Earth close to Venus's orbit giving it a good view of asteroids between us and the sun. It looks away from the sun and can see faint NEOs that are in between the Earth and the Sun which is the hardest place to spot them from our current Earth based surveys. It would help fix that blind spot for asteroids that come from the direction of the sun. It looks in infra red because the asteroids are far more obvious in the infrared. Idea is that it would find nearly all potential impactors down to 40 meters diameter. And recently announced, that it should be able to spot them down to 20 meters diameter.
They hoped to launch it in 2017 to 2018 on a Falcon 9. And to find 90% of NEOs down to 140 meters within ten years and a significant proportion of all NEOs down to 20 meters. - but sadly though they got millions of dollars of private donations they never got enough funding. It is still on the go, but they won’t be able to fly it any time soon unless someone steps in with funding to fill the gap.
Even a billionaire, a philanthropist individual, could do this. And then effectively retire most of the remaining risk from asteroid impacts.
For more on this see my Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
And for Nibiru:
- Simple Ways To See Nibiru Is Totally Nuts - And Limits On Planets Hiding In Our Solar System
- "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru - Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes & Just Plain Silly - note the word "Bullshit" is not a "bad word" in the UK, is used by just about anyone as a mild exclamation. The title here is a quote from Brian Cox, popular astronomer / presenter in the UK, a bit like Neil de Grasse Tyson is in the US.
- No, There Isn't A Planet Called Nibiru, Soon To Hit Earth, And Often Visible In Your Photos Of The Sun :)
And "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru as a kindle booklet
Get this as a kindle ebook (127 pages)
(BTW I plan to do a new book when I have time, incorporate some of the things from my other articles like this one)
I’ve just written this up for my science blog as Why We Can't Have A Mystery Planet Hidden Behind The Sun Or Above The South Pole
And if you are interested, please sign my petition here:
Let's End Dramatized Reporting of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal
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